A
blurb on the back cover of Jonis Agee’s
novel The River Wife says, “Make
sandwiches and turn off the phone, because this is
a novel you won’t put down.”

Blurbs like that are usually
hyperbole, but this one proved true for me. I just
wish I’d followed its advice and found a place
to read undisturbed, which is what I wanted to do
from the first page.

The time and the setting couldn’t
be juicier for a novel that takes place on the Mississippi
River. After a framing prologue, the story begins
during the great earthquake at New Madrid, Mo., in
1811. A teenaged girl cries for her mother as the
house shakes and the river hisses.

“Her narrow iron bed, with
its lovely white scrollwork — a luxury somehow
accorded a girl of 16 though her father was against
it from the beginning — slid back and forth
behind the partition as if they were on the river,
the roar so loud it was like a thousand beasts from
the apocalypse set loose upon the land, just as her
father had predicted.”

The roof beam collapses on top
of her, crushing her legs. Believing, like their
neighbors, that judgment day is upon them, the crazed
family flees, taking all the clothing and food.

“Farewell, dear girl, we
shall meet on the far shore, clothed in His bright
joy,” her father says. The rasp in his voice,
a candle and a wet deerskin is all he leaves to comfort
his daughter.

Poor Annie Lark. This is only
the first of many chilling betrayals and surprises
in store for her and the characters that succeed
her through this 393-page novel, which traverses
120 years on the river.

Annie is crippled for life, but
she’s no victim, and it’s a wild and
gritty life she leads. Her husband, One-Armed Jacques
Ducharme, is a French fur trader who becomes an inn
keeper, then a trader, then a pirate, always making
the most of his location on the river, as riverboats,
slave traders, and Confederate and Union soldiers
move up and down. One-Armed Jacques is the pin around
which the whole story centers. John James Audubon,
wandering about, looking for birds, plays a key part
at one point.

Agee’s done plenty of historical
research for this imaginative tale. The book meanders
like a river through more than a century of the fortunes
and misfortunes of a host of complicated, peculiar
and unpredictable characters — Annie, One-Armed
Jacques, Omah, Laura Burke Shut, Little Maddie, L.O.
Swan. Agee’s writing is fine. Her previous
books include Sweet Eyes, Strange Angels and The
Weight of Dreams.

For a person who loves to read,
there’s nothing so luxurious as a book so absorbing
that the rest of life seems pale in comparison, at
least for a few days. This is one. Top

Detective
and crime writers often turn the locale into a
main character of their books. The map has become speckled with writers covering
their stomping grounds, from Raymond Chandler’s
Los Angeles to Tony Hillerman’s four-corners.
Mary Logue has staked out Pepin County, the smallest
county in Wisconsin and one of the most picturesque — with
its steep bluffs rising from Lake Pepin.

This fifth book of the Claire
Watkins series sets pivotal events in the story on
the edge of Maiden Rock, the dramatic cliff towering
over Lake Pepin (See “A Hike on Maiden Rock
Bluff” Big River September-October 2007). Watkins
is a deputy sheriff and mother of a teenage daughter
who goes missing after a Halloween party. Methedrine,
missing persons and deaths keep the county stirred
up from early in the book until the last page.

Logue does a good job of capturing
the attitudes and speech of the local people, but
doesn’t devote a lot of energy to the sights,
smells and sounds of the area. The book is a light,
enjoyable read. The perspective constantly shifts
between the points of view of a half-dozen characters,
giving the reader enough information to keep a step
or two ahead of Watkins. Readers from the area will
enjoy the scenes taking place in Wabasha, Durand,
Pepin, Nelson and other familiar spots.

The Effigy Mounds National
Monument, just upriver from Marquette, Iowa, is a remarkable
place for a number of reasons: it
has the largest collection of Indian mounds, the largest
collection of effigy mounds, a great little museum, amazing
Mississippi River overlooks and miles of scenic hiking
trails. The area is also sacred to some people.

This guide
is a bit of a hodgepodge, but it covers a lot of ground
in its slim package. The first 30 pages gallop through
12,000 years of history before the settlers arrived. Then a timeline
summarizes highlights in history from 1673, when Marquette and Joliet
arrived at the Mississippi River nearby, to 2002, when the Yellow River
Bridge Boardwalk Trail was completed. Then follows a history of white
people discovering and trying to understand the mounds, then a
history of how the monument came into being and how it
came to be what it is today. A couple of pages offers ideas
about the mounds from a member of the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk)
Tribe of Nebraska. The final section of the book describes
places and trails in the monument.

Several individuals who
were important to the monument and local archaeology are
profiled briefly, including Ellison Orr, who explored and
documented countless sites over most of his long lifetime. He and his
son, Fred, conducted field studies until the elder Orr was well into
his 80s.

As someone who usually visits the monument at least
once a year, I enjoyed the book, especially learning about
the history of the Yellow River Valley. A casual visitor to the monument
might wonder why people built so many mounds here — what makes
this place special. The book does a good job of explaining that the
monument is on the edge of a huge area stretching across
southern Wisconsin that was rich with effigy and other types of mounds.
The more important question might be “Why is this the largest
intact group of mounds, and why were nearly all the others destroyed?” This
book does a good job of answering these questions.

“Today, Effigy
Mounds National Monument preserves remnants of a cultural
tradition of the people who built mounds of earth. Within the national
monument, 206 known mounds are preserved, 31 in the shapes of animals.
At one time, an estimated 10,000 mounds existed in northeast
Iowa alone, today less [sic] than a thousand remain.” Top

Nancy Scheibe records the first
leg of
her paddle down the Mississippi to celebrate her 50th birthday. This
2004 journey took the Ely, Minn., artist and her traveling
companion Heather Jeske from the headwaters at Lake Itasca
to Red Wing, Minn. Along the way, they were joined by numerous
other canoeists and kayakers for portions of the trip,
and organized gatherings with women to talk and share personal
stories. The first women invited to speak at these groups
were “grandmothers,” from
the Native American tradition of calling any woman over
50 a grandmother, whether she has children or not.

Stories
from the gatherings are sprinkled throughout, while the
narrative flows as a journal through the book. The reader
can choose to read the stories, or just the travel journal, or go back
and forth. I skipped some of the personal stories, then went back to
read more later. Many of the women told stories of painful life experiences,
what they had learned and how they had found personal strength.

A
powerful spiritual theme runs through both the grandmother
stories and the river travels. Scheibe often sees messages
and connections in nature, such as a bird showing them the way, a lone
basking turtle reminding her that being alone is okay,
a snake in the road giving her the message that taking no action can
have negative results. Thankfully, she did not interpret all her animal
encounters this way. I read over these parts pretty fast, as well as
some of the detailed descriptions and personal experiences about
the paddlers.

Self-renewal, getting closer to one’s real
self, community and women’s wisdom
were the women's motivations for taking and sharing the
journey.

Their
experiences with the river itself gave me a good idea what
to expect if I ever think of taking such a journey. In
this way, the account serves as a helpful guide. A windy crossing of
Cass Lake became a little dangerous, a warning for others. Scheibe’s
descriptions of campgrounds, wildlife, weather events,
paddling challenges and locking through are interesting
for both real and armchair Mississippi River paddlers.

This September (2007),
Scheibe resumed her river trip at Red Wing with another
traveling partner, and planned to arrive in St. Louis mid-October.
She planned gatherings along the way, as in 2004. Two more
jaunts will complete the journey in New Orleans. Top

Mississippi
River sandbars and islands are not exactly wild around
here, but wild enough to keep an eye out for snakes and
turtles and various furry, four-legged critters that may
be wandering about. But when young Will Finn is washed
up on an island down by Memphis he finds fierce mutant
ferrets the size of golden retrievers. The island also
harbors Daschell Potts, a reclusive — and probably demented
— author whose claim to fame is his notoriously
popular book Folderol, a philosophical and inspirational
story about a duck swimming in a circle.

Will makes do on the island,
using flotsam that washes up on shore, including a BarcaLounger
and assorted junk food. As he says, “On the Mississippi River,
if you keep your eyes peeled, whatever you’re likely to need
will eventually pass by.”

He is overjoyed to discover Potts,
his favorite author, but is aghast at the man’s missing ear,
removed by a particularly nasty ferret. Trying to get a
peek at what he thinks is Potts’ new
manuscript, Will stumbles into trouble, but always figures
something out or is rescued in the nick of time. (He’s proud
of his personal motto, courtesy of his fourth-grade teacher, “Where
there’s
a Will there’s a way.”) It takes Will a while to figure
out what kind of nefarious scheme Potts is dreaming up,
involving the bloodthirsty ferrets and fast food.

Richard Jennings tips his
hat to Mark Twain more than a few times in this juvenile
novel. Will Finn’s best buddy on the
island is a friendly and helpful ferret, Jim; Huckleberry
Finn and Folderol are the two books that a local town council
deem worthy of destroying. Not to mention the chapter titled “Life
on the Mississippi,” and
the pretty, blond girl who also lands on the island and
gets lost in a cave with Will.

The action really gets going
after Will (barely) escapes the island (Warning: SPOILER
ahead) through a tunnel under the river dug out by thousands
of sharp ferret teeth. He catches a ride on a turnip truck and falls
off, meets a misguided federal officer in hot pursuit of rampaging
parrots, and enlists the help of a former-congressman/ex-con-turned-Homeland
Security agent, Pierre Narf. In an attempt to save the
world, Will must pursue Potts and his school bus full of
giant hungry ferrets.

Yes, it’s a wacky ride, and adults
will chuckle along with the younger readers for whom this
book is written. Along the way, I learned a few fun facts
about ferrets: they steal things; they smell bad; and they smell really
bad when they are really big:

“…you learn that a ferret’s
smell is not a rancid stink like the monkey house at the
zoo, but a rich and complex bouquet on the order of Ethiopian coffee,
Honduran cigars, or Parmesano Reggiano cheese, an aroma that’s
immediately identifiable, a musky essence that announces, ‘I
am weasel, smell me more.’”

Jennings sneaks in a plug for
a previous novel, Stink City, about a boy whose family
has a secret recipe for an incredibly stinky and successful
catfish bait. Mmm… there’s
no denying the olfactory possibilities of the Mississippi
River.Top

All of these books suggest dozens of outdoor excursions,
each of which are sketched with a clear map and detailed
explanations of what to expect, points of interest and
useful information, including campgrounds and rentals.
They all include trips on or near the Mississippi River.

To
take in a pannier or canoe, you’d probably prefer to copy
the pages you need, but the descriptions include enough
detail to tempt you to while away a frigid afternoon daydreaming
of summer adventures. Top

Hell Gate of the Mississippi is a meticulous, engaging
book about the who, why and how of one of the most famous
trials on the Mississippi River. In May of 1856 the Effie
Afton steamboat crashed into a railroad bridge over the
Mississippi. Captain Hurd, owner and pilot of the boat, sued the Railroad
Bridge Company for building the bridge at a treacherous
location and thereby endangering river traffic. Abraham
Lincoln, a young, relatively inexperienced lawyer from Springfield,
Ill., was recruited to join the legal team defending the Railroad Bridge
Company.

The trial was important because the privately funded
bridge was the first railroad bridge to span the river,
linking the expanding agricultural areas of Iowa with markets in
the East. Railroads were poised to triumph over riverboat
shipping, and river people up and down the Mississippi
knew it. They protested the bridge before it was built.
Two weeks after it was completed, the Effie Afton crashed
into it, burst into flame and burned up the bridge. The
steamboating community celebrated the bridge’s demise
and supported Captain Hurd throughout the first, high-profile
trial, which ended in a hung jury, and through succeeding
attempts to win the case.

Abraham Lincoln was one of several
lawyers arguing the case, and gave a summary speech for
the defense. He was paid $800 for his labor, not nearly
as much as he was paid for other work. The author points out, however,
that it was no doubt good strategy for a country lawyer with political
ambitions to work for influential Chicago railroad interests.

To
the author’s credit, the book was far more absorbing than
one might expect from a story about a long-past legal dispute.
I’ve
heard about the Effie Afton incident, but didn’t know why the
trial was still in public memory 150 years after it happened.

For my taste, though, the book exhausted me with
details in places, such as an explanation of exactly where
the stones for the short piers supporting the bridge spans
were quarried. The story is good enough that I just wanted
the author to get on with it and not slow down for such historical
footnotes. Top

While you
are holed up in a heated room under artificial light this
winter, you might want to pick up this book and dream of
birding days to come.

The uncommon birds that are the subject of the
book are uncommon because their numbers have decreased
(red-headed woodpecker), or because they may be here one
year and not the next (snowy owl) or because they’re just plain
hard to find (Townsend’s solitaire).

It’s a very satisfying
book just to sit and look at. Dana Gardner’s
watercolor illustrations are beautiful, evocative and stylish.
Gardner paints distinctive details of each bird and its
plumage, along with a few key elements of a typical place
where it might be seen. A kind of silence surrounds each bird — the
backgrounds are left serene and dreamy, like the wide open spaces of
nature. For example, the Acadian flycatcher perches on an oak twig,
from which dangle old, curled, brown oak leaves. The bird’s soft
brown back and slight head crest, its white eye ring and the configuration
of white bars on its black wing are all concisely portrayed. The background
is a hazy blur of spring green.

The text by Nancy Overcott is amiable, informative
and easy to read. She tells about each bird and recounts at
least one birding adventure involving it. Her friends and
neighbors, and other birders are characters in these little
stories, most of which take place near her home in Fillmore
County, Minn., where she writes about birds for the Fillmore
County Journal.

At first glance, vultures
don’t seem a plausible subject for
a book for small children. After all, they’re kind of bizarre-looking,
with a preference for food that been dead awhile and therefore
stinks. But Sayre tells their story in light-hearted rhymes
suitable for young children.